Bon Hae Judith Roitman interview

Zen Master Bon Hae (Judith Roitman) is a Zen teacher with the Kwan Um School of Zen. She began practicing Zen with Zen Master Seung Sahn in 1976 at the Cambridge Zen Center. She was one of the founders of the Kansas Zen Center in 1978 and received inka (authorization to teach) from Zen Master Seung Sahn in 1998. On April 6, 2013, Roitman received dharma transmission in Seung Sahn’s lineage. She is the Guiding Teacher of the Kansas Zen Center, the Red Earth Zen Center in Oklahoma, and Deming Zen Center in New Mexico. Zen Master Bon Hae is married to Zen Master Hae Kwang Stanley Lombardo, also of the Kwan Um School of Zen.

SZ: How did you first come to Zen practice? What was happening at the time?

JR: I grew up in a crazy-making situation, and by the time I left graduate school I was pretty nuts and at times suicidal. In desperation I started practicing relaxation response meditation (from a New York Times Magazine article) and also found an amazing gestalt therapist. After a couple of years of therapy I was sitting one day in her office and said “I don’t have to be this way, do I.” She said “No, you don’t” and in that moment all my craziness just lifted, like when a tornado disappears, sucked up into the clouds. Fwoom, gone, finished, just like that.

It was after that that I visited the Cambridge Zen Center — before that I was way too nuts to hang around with any group of people. How I ended up at CZC turned out to be a serendipitous mistake. I lived in central Cambridge and often walked by a beautiful building on a beautifully groomed property that was some kind of Zen center (I learned many years later that it was Maureen Freedgood’s place). On October 6, 1976, Yom Kippur, I couldn’t do my usual hike-in-the-mountains-while-fasting observance because of compelling errands, so I decided that going to a Zen center was a suitable observance. I looked up Cambridge Zen Center in the phone book and discovered it was in Allston. Okay, I thought, I guess it moved. So instead of walking into Maureen Freedgood’s Japanese practice, I walked into Zen Master Seung Sahn’s Korean practice. In order to observe Yom Kippur. Go figure.

I knocked on the door about 10 minutes before practice and Mark and Dyan Houghton were chasing each other around squirting each other with plant spritzers (they swear this never happened) and Peter Harrington and Paul Rosenbloom were washing dishes in the kitchen. Paul asked if I had a meditation practice and I said “counting my breaths.” Peter whirled around and said “how many have you counted?” I knew at that moment that I’d come to the right place. When I heard the evening bell chant, I knew that I’d come home.

I first saw Zen Master Seung Sahn about a month later. He gave a dharma talk and said things like “Is this a cup or is it not a cup?” and then drank from the cup and my mind was screaming in frustration “he’s not answering the question!” and by the end of his talk I was hit really hard with the fact that nothing I knew was worth knowing, that I didn’t know a damn thing, that all my cleverness and all the rewards for my cleverness were totally worthless. I was so freaked out and disoriented that I couldn’t even drive home. I called my friend Lucy and asked her to pick me up. She came and walked me around the block a few times while I slashed my arms through the air saying “I don’t know anything” over and over again. When I’d calmed down she took me out for a corned beef sandwich, then took me back to my car, and I managed to get home.

I was still pretty unsteady in my mind and a few days later I asked my Introduction to Zen teacher at the CZC (who happened to be Jonny Kabat-Zinn , this was several years before he came up with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) what to do and he said to read Dogen. So I got a book of Dogen out of the library and read some pages and didn’t understand a word but somehow that calmed me down. Four months later I took 5 precepts. Less than a year after that I was in Lawrence where a meditation group was starting (my husband jokes that he advertised for a Zen wife and I showed up). 9 months later Zen Master Seung Sahn performed our wedding at the Eldridge Hotel and the fate of our little meditation group was pretty much sealed.

SZ: What’s the purpose of Zen practice?

JR: I’m not comfortable with “purpose.” If you have a purpose then you’ve put on blinders and can’t see anything except what you’re looking for. So let’s not go there.

If you practice you find out why you practice. If you practice and then stop practicing, then you really find out.

After I’d been practicing about 15 years, when my son was 12 years old — too old to have a babysitter while my husband and I ran off to the Zen center, but too young to leave alone so much — I decided to stop going to the Zen center for a while. Before too long I’d stopped practicing at home. No real reason, I just stopped. I stopped for about two years. Then one day I just started again.

I don’t recommend this, but I’m glad it happened. It makes me a lot less judgmental about people who don’t practice. I still don’t understand what the not practicing was about. I strongly believe in practice — even when I wasn’t practicing I strongly believed in it. What does it do? I really don’t know. Except that everything shifts when you practice. It just shifts. Like when you’re at the eye doctor and they change the lens and things come into focus. Like that.

Not just about perceptual clarity, though. It’s what what Zen Master Seung Sahn wrote when See Hoy Liau (later to become the monk and Zen master Su Bong Sunim) wrote him a letter asking what the fast way to Zen was — that’s kind of the same as your question. Seung Sahn said: not for me. That’s a very important point. Nobody owns their life. Why do you eat every day? Why do you get out of bed? For whom do you live your life? This is, not the purpose, but the point of Zen practice. That’s the direction that practice is pointing to, like when you get on I-70 in Lawrence KS and the arrows point: Topeka this way, Kansas City that way.

SZ: What do you make of some of the recent scandals to have hit the Zen community?

JR: It doesn’t matter what I make of it. How each sangha responds is what’s important: the sanghas that have been hurt, and the sanghas that have had their eyes opened to the possibilities of hurt. In any social group, including the Zen community, some human beings will act badly. What do we do then?

That said, I’m concerned about all the public comments made by people not in the various communities who are struggling with this — ZSS, Rinzai-Ji, whoever — I’m concerned about outside people who, without invitation, publicly tell the struggling communities what they should be doing. The world is vast and wide — Yun-men said that, didn’t he — and there are lots of paths to healing. Each community needs to be given the space and time to find its way. I know some of the ZSS people and some of the Rinzai-Ji people and feel strongly that they are, in their different ways, finding their way forward. There is a lot of wisdom in the leadership of both groups. But I don’t think that folks shouting at them publicly from the wings will help, I think that just makes the people in those organizations who are resisting change defensive and makes it harder for those working for change to get change done.

I’d like to add that I don’t think that sex is the problem, I think it’s the symptom. The real problem is stated in the kong-an about Baizhang’s fox: thinking you are not subject to cause and effect. You combine this with the devaluation of women and you have the terrible situations that went on for so long without public knowledge. But it’s the teacher’s sense of invulnerability that’s behind all of this, the sense of invulnerability and of entitlement. Without sexual abuse there can be equally poisonous situations — in fact there are equally poisonous situations — but we have a harder time noticing them.

SZ: What is your view on romantic relationships between teachers and students in the sangha?

JR: Well my husband was a teacher for six years before I became a teacher. So in those six years he was sleeping with a student who happened to be his wife. Of course he was my husband for 14 years before he became a teacher. And someone already in a relationship who becomes a teacher is not what you’re asking about. But that situation sheds light on the question you’re asking, which is: can a teacher and a student have a genuine, mutual, loving relationship? Of course. But you have to be careful.

I think the Kwan Um School of Zen (my school) has it pretty much right in our code of ethics. If a genuine relationship develops between a student and teacher (and some lasting ones have) then the couple consults with another teacher before going ahead, and the student works with another teacher for a somewhat lengthy period of time before working again with the partner. Exploitative relationships, relationships that use the teaching position as a method of seduction, casual relationships between teacher and student, etc. — all of these are frowned on, and there is an ethics committee to hear complaints.

Another rule in KUSZ is that romantic partners are not involved in decisions about authorizing the other partner for inka or transmission.

SZ: What is the makeup of your community in Kansas?

JR: Relatively small. Mixed gender-wise and age-wise (gratifyingly re: age — in the beginning we were pretty much all south of 40 and later we were a bunch of people pretty much north of 40, so it’s good to have a mix), not so much ethnicity-wise or politically. But it’s small enough that a perturbation of three or four people in any direction would represent a big shift.

SZ: You recently received dharma transmission in your lineage in April at Providence Zen Center. What’s that process like in the Kwan Um School of Zen?

JR: We have two levels of authorization: inka and transmission. Inka is the first level. When you have inka you are teaching independently within the school: leading retreats, giving kong-an interviews, the whole ball of wax. People with inka (the title is “ji do poep sa nim”) can help decide who else will get inka, but they can’t decide who will get transmission. When you get transmission you can help decide that too. When you get transmission you get the title of Zen master (soen sa). There’s a lot of mystique about that, but it’s just, you know, mystique.

Our inka and transmission is corporate. That is, five people have to approve an inka candidate and there is a committee of three people for each transmission candidate. One person puts up the candidate for inka or transmission, but a group of people must approve the candidate.

For inka we go outside the local center’s teacher: an inka candidate has to have serious encounters with at least five teachers in our school. For transmission we go outside the school: part of the training for transmission is to practice with teachers in other Linchi schools, i.e., traditions that use koans. Sitting retreats with other sanghas, encountering teachers and traditions outside our tradition — I found this invaluable and hope to continue doing this.

SZ: What are some of the more important sutras to the Zen tradition in your view and why?

JR: You want to limit it to sutras? Diamond Sutra. Vimalakirti Sutra. Lotus Sutra. I’m told the Lankavatara Sutra but I admit to not having read it; a readable and reliable translation has only been available for a few years. Avatamsaka Sutra but I admit to only having dipped into it — it’s pretty daunting.

But there are non-sutras which are equally if not more important, namely the various kong-an collections: Mumonkan, Blue Cliff Record, the various encounters in the (Chinese) Transmission of the Lamp (and if you know of a way to get Ogata’s translation please let me know, it’s been out of print forever and it’s wonderful)…

If you’re interested in the Korean tradition it’s essential to read So Sahn and Chinul, who are as central to the Korean tradition as Dogen is to Soto or Hakuin to Rinzai.

SZ: What is dharma combat and what it its purpose?

JR: Zen Master Seung Sahn said that dharma combat means helping each other. This means in a particular way: helping each other keep your mind swords sharp. It’s like musicians playing together and getting better because they play together. If nobody challenges you, you can get lazy and complacent.

JR: I have no idea what the mission of AZTA is. You can check the mission statement if you want at http://www.americanzenteachers.org/, but mission statements are one thing and what actually happens is another. I do know that I’ve made good friends in other traditions and gained a broader vision. I feel loyalty to my own tradition and don’t consciously try to change it, but I think the kind of respectful rubbing up against each other that AZTA fosters among our communities is exactly the way that a truly American Zen will eventually in its own time appear. I’m also on the membership committee and when you read membership applications you see the tremendous variety within our community. It’s wonderful.

An important aspect of AZTA is to give Zen teachers a larger peer group. Some of us — Kwan Um, the Shunruyu Suzuki lineage, etc — have lots of dharma brothers and sisters who come together at least semi-regularly; other folks are more isolated. And even those of us in the larger families can be helped by people with different backgrounds and perspectives. I know that I have.

SZ: Are there any books you would recommend to readers on Zen practice?

JR: Too many! Before I list them, a caveat that reading is only helpful if it supports our practice. And a second caveat that books which seem to make no sense at one point in practice may be inspirational at another point. Okay, now the list.

If you want compilations, there’s Nelson Foster’s The Roaring Stream. And, close to my own home, The Zen Sourcebook (edited by Steve Addiss with substantial help from my husband Stan Lombardo and some help from me).

For people who’ve been practicing for a while: the great Korean master So Sahn’s Mirror of Zen (Shambhala confusingly lists the author as Boep Joeng, a long story which we won’t go into). Red Pine’s translations and commentaries on the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. The Platform Sutra a.k.a. the Sutra of Hui Neng, multiple good translations here. Burton Watson’s translation of the Lotus Sutra. Jay Garfield’s translation of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika a.k.a. Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Any of Robert Buswell’s translations of Chinul.

For stuff on women: Grace Schireson’s Zen Women. Martine Bachelor’s Women in Korean Buddhism (a misleading title — it’s not a survey but her personal account of her own practice as a nun in Korea together with the autobiography of the great Korean nun Songyong Sunim). Beata Grant’s Daughters of Emptiness. Susan Murcott’s The First Buddhist Women. In the history of Buddhism, men have taught both men and women but men have not often had access to women teachers (Moshan was a great ancient exception). Now everyone can have access to these extraordinary women of the past. And should.

Note that this is a very partal list. For example I left out Ta Hui, Hakuin, Robert Aitken, Richard Shrobe, Shodo Harada… the list goes on and on so I’ll just stop here.

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